On Jan 11, 2006, at 8:18 AM, Alec Flett wrote:
I have a very quick-entry-point goal: More QA.
Sure. As Aparna has mentioned, we're kind of underway to do more of
this. One thing I am interested in is how to actually get more
people to participate in QA. Most of what we have now is "let's put
up bugzilla and tell people to go there, and they'll just come".
Except that we don't have a big user base or a lot of momentum. So
unlike one of the highly visible projects, like Firefox or Apache, I
think we actually need to work at getting people to just file a bug
report. If you look at <https://bugzilla.osafoundation.org/
buglist.cgi?
query_format=&short_desc_type=allwordssubstr&short_desc=&long_desc_type=
substring&long_desc=&bug_file_loc_type=allwordssubstr&bug_file_loc=&stat
us_whiteboard_type=allwordssubstr&status_whiteboard=&keywords_type=allwo
rds&keywords=&bug_status=NEW&bug_status=ASSIGNED&bug_status=REOPENED&ema
ilreporter1=1&emailtype1=notregexp&email1=osafoundation.org&emailassigne
d_to2=1&emailreporter2=1&emailcc2=1&emailtype2=notregexp&email2=&bugidty
pe=include&bug_id=&votes=&chfieldfrom=2005-12-20&chfieldto=Now&chfieldva
lue=&cmdtype=doit&order=Reuse+same+sort+as+last
+time&field0-0-0=noop&type0-0-0=noop&value0-0-0=> You'll see that
there are 13 non-osaf bugs (actually less than that) in Bugzilla
since the date of the 0.6 announcement. So we're not exactly
getting a flood here.
Ted
In my experience, this is the easiest way for new contributors to
get involved in an end-user product - mostly because it means that
contributors don't have to be coders, and because the granularity
of the work is very small.
I know people are constantly going on about how we need more
automated tests but end-user apps also need a healthy amount of
human interaction to find things that automated tests are never
going to find (unless we stop developing chandler altogether and
just write tests for 6 months) ... i.e. it takes a human to notice
than when you drag a calendar event into a saturday, that the
minicalendar turns blue or that the "sync" button gets disabled
when you stamp an event as an e-mail, then a task, and then unstamp
it as an e-mail. (don't worry, none of this really happens!)
Further, there are lots of very helpful things that QA contributors
can do within the bug system, beyond simply filing bugs.
1) manage dupes: finding dupes of existing bugs is very valuable,
especially as the number of people filing bugs goes up. This
usually means people looking at bugs that have been filed in the
last day or so, and looking for existing dupes - this is really an
art and when done well its rather amazing.
2) help narrow down bugs filed by other reports - this involves
taking existing bugs that may not be well defined, and narrowing
their scope to exactly what the problem is. Maybe it turns out that
the minical only turns blue when you're dragging all day events
that start before the present date? This might involve just asking
the reporter for more details, or it may involve trying to
reproduce the bug.
3) platform testing - taking bugs that were reported on Mac but
seem to be cross platform, trying them on Linux, and reporting
results in the bug.
I'm sure there are many other helpful things that I'm not thinking
of but these are the ones that spring to mind. Its rather amazing
on the mozilla project the way you can file a duplicate bug and it
gets marked as a duplicate within 2 hours!
Alec
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